DVD review: Shutter Island | Shelter

Published on Tuesday 27 July 2010 16:11

SHUTTER ISLAND PARAMOUNT, £19.99 SHELTER ICON, £17.99

PURISTS may sniff at Martin Scorsese's post-Oscar turn towards trash in Shutter Island, but in making his pulpiest movie since Cape Fear he's delivered a luridly entertaining film which indulges his passion for the primitive, pugnacious spirit of Sam Fuller, Alfred Hitchcock and the countless other studio filmmakers of the post-war era who made an art out of delivering cheap thrills for the escape-seeking masses. He's also provided regular leading man Leonardo DiCaprio with another juicy role, one that makes great use of that squinting James Cagney grimace his features finally seem to be growing into. Set in 1954, the film casts DiCaprio as a war-frazzled US Marshal. Assigned to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a patient from the titular nuthouse, he finds himself questioning his own fractured mental state as the film moves from a tightly wound locked-room mystery into a trippy, full-on psychological freak-out. Though Scorsese gets to let rip here with all the ticks and tricks of the gothic horror b-movies on which he's riffing, he can't help but imbue these tropes with the fluidity and aesthetic beauty of something much richer. Which may again strike some as a waste of his talents, but Shutter Island is the closest he's come to making a purely cinematic ride and the cinematic element of that ride makes it a distinctive film. Like his protagonist, Scorsese can't get the past out of his head, but he can transform it into something crazy and fresh.

The same can't be said for Shelter. Like Shutter Island, it's a lurid mainstream psycho-horror film featuring characters with fractured psyches. Unlike Shutter Island it's operating under the strange illusion that it's doing something new and clever. That it has a surface patina of quality is initially down to Julianne Moore's bizarre decision to sign on to play a forensic psychiatrist who insists she doesn't believe in multiple personality disorder until her less sceptical father embroils her in a case involving a young man (Jonathan Rhys Myers) with the personality of several murder victims. Shoddy character work, idiotic plotting and atmosphere-free direction duly conspire to eliminate any attempts at tension, while Moore's unwavering professionalism looks more and more out of place as the film starts introducing sympathetic portrayals of loony religious cults.